This insane bamboo treehouse doesn't use any nails or screws

To build a treehouse, you normally need nails or screws, a hammer, and planks of wood.

But Penda, a Beijing-based architecture firm, has designed a treehouse that doesn't use any of those things. It would only require rope and rods of bamboo. 

The design concept recently won second place in the architecture design category at the 2016 A'Design Awards.

Penda hasn't built the treehouse yet, but it prototyped a small model of the modular bamboo system in 2015. The team calls the design "Rising Canes" since layers of bamboo would stack on top of each other to form the treehouse.

The team hopes to build a larger model outside Beijing by 2023 — one where about 20,000 people could live.

Keep scrolling to check it out. 

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The treehouse would use recycled, local bamboo and have little environmental impact on the site, the team writes on Behance.

Source: Behance

Penda connects the bamboo rods with ropes — rather than nails — to form the joints. Eight rods make up what the team calls a "knot," a series of which would be used to create walls of interlaced bamboo.

The floors would be made of side-by-side rods. It's a modular system, meaning new layers could be built off-site, then delivered and added to the existing structure.